The employees' entrepreneurial mindset: The influence of perceived supervisor effort on the employees' entrepreneurial passion

Kallinikidis, Athanasios Konstantinos Article The employees' entrepreneurial mindset: The influence of perceived supervisor effort on the employees' entrepreneurial passion Junior Management Science (JUMS) Provided in Cooperation with: Junior Management Science e. V. Suggested Citation: Kallinikidis, Athanasios Konstantinos (2024) : The employees' entrepreneurial mindset: The influence of perceived supervisor effort on the employees' entrepreneurial passion, Junior Management Science (JUMS), ISSN 2942-1861, Junior Management Science e. V., Planegg, Vol. 9, Iss. 3, pp. 1634-1664, https://doi.org/10.5282/jums/v9i3pp1634-1664 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/305310 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 Junior Management Science www.jums.academy ISSN: 2942-1861 Editor: DOMINIK VAN AAKEN Advisory Editorial Board: FREDERIK AHLEMANN JAN-PHILIPP AHRENS THOMAS BAHLINGER MARKUS BECKMANN CHRISTOPH BODE SULEIKA BORT ROLF BRÜHL KATRIN BURMEISTER-LAMP CATHERINE CLEOPHAS NILS CRASSELT BENEDIKT DOWNAR RALF ELSAS KERSTIN FEHRE MATTHIAS FINK DAVID FLORYSIAK GUNTHER FRIEDL MARTIN FRIESL FRANZ FUERST WOLFGANG GÜTTEL NINA KATRIN HANSEN ANNE KATARINA HEIDER CHRISTIAN HOFMANN SVEN HÖRNER KATJA HUTTER LUTZ JOHANNING STEPHAN KAISER NADINE KAMMERLANDER ALFRED KIESER NATALIA KLIEWER DODO ZU KNYPHAUSEN-AUFSESS SABINE T. KÖSZEGI ARJAN KOZICA CHRISTIAN KOZIOL MARTIN KREEB TOBIAS KRETSCHMER WERNER KUNZ HANS-ULRICH KÜPPER MICHAEL MEYER JÜRGEN MÜHLBACHER GORDON MÜLLER-SEITZ J. PETER MURMANN ANDREAS OSTERMAIER BURKHARD PEDELL MARCEL PROKOPCZUK TANJA RABL SASCHA RAITHEL NICOLE RATZINGER-SAKEL ASTRID REICHEL KATJA ROST THOMAS RUSSACK FLORIAN SAHLING MARKO SARSTEDT ANDREAS G. SCHERER STEFAN SCHMID UTE SCHMIEL CHRISTIAN SCHMITZ MARTIN SCHNEIDER MARKUS SCHOLZ LARS SCHWEIZER DAVID SEIDL THORSTEN SELLHORN STEFAN SEURING VIOLETTA SPLITTER ANDREAS SUCHANEK TILL TALAULICAR ANN TANK ORESTIS TERZIDIS ANJA TUSCHKE MATTHIAS UHL CHRISTINE VALLASTER PATRICK VELTE CHRISTIAN VÖGTLIN STEPHAN WAGNER BARBARA E. WEISSENBERGER ISABELL M. WELPE HANNES WINNER THOMAS WRONA THOMAS ZWICK Volume 9, Issue 3, September 2024 JUNIOR MANAGEMENT SCIENCE Anna Smerdiagina,Lost in Transcription: Experimental Findings on Ethnic and Age Biases in AI Systems Jaqueline Domnick, Authenticity and Brand Activism –An Empirical Analysis Athanasios Konstantinos Kallinikidis, The Employees’ Entrepreneurial Mindset: The Influence of Perceived Supervisor Effort on the Employees’ Entrepreneurial Passion Leonie Böhm, Motivations and Outcomes of the AntiConsumption Practice ‘Stooping’ Lukas Hilke, When Does Marketing & Sales Collaboration Affect the Perceived Lead Quality? –The Moderating Effects of IT Systems Hannah Franziska Gundel, Accelerator Impact on Peer Networking - Examining the Formation, Use, and Development of Inter-Organizational Networks Among Early-Stage Start-Ups Anna Simon, Developing and Maintaining a Strong Corporate Culture, While Coping With a Workforce Growing Significantly: A Qualitative Analysis onCorporate Culture Development of Fast-Growing Start-Ups Robin Spira, How Does ESG Rating Disagreement Influence Analyst Forecast Dispersion? Christoph Weeber, Development of a Cost Optimal Predictive Maintenance Strategy Alexandra Hanna James, The Munich Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in the Health Sector: Current State and Improvement Areas 1591 1609 1634 1665 1681 1700 1733 1769 1805 1836 Published by Junior Management Science e.V. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International). Open Access funding provided by ZBW. ISSN: 2942-1861 The Employees’ Entrepreneurial Mindset: The Influence of Perceived Supervisor Effort on the Employees’ Entrepreneurial Passion Athanasios Konstantinos Kallinikidis Technical University of Munich Abstract This paper examines the effect of perceived supervisor effort on the employees’ entrepreneurial passion. The study combines theories on emotional contagion, goal contagion, and self-regulation to explain the underlying mechanisms for occurring phenomena. Case-based research delivered the data to investigate the relationship between perceived supervisor effort and the employees’ entrepreneurial passion. The data revealed that proximity to the founders, entrepreneurial-relatedness of the employee’s tasks, and initial entrepreneurial passion work as antecedents of the combined mechanism of contagion and selfregulation. The findings suggest that employees are affected positively by the perception of high effort and negatively by the perception of low effort in their passion for entrepreneurship when proximity to the founders, entrepreneurial-relatedness of the tasks, and initial entrepreneurial passion are high. However, the perception of high effort can decrease entrepreneurial passion when employees were initially low passionate about entrepreneurship. This work contributes to the literature by providing a theoretical model that describes how perceived supervisor effort impacts entrepreneurial passion on an employeelevel outcome. Keywords: contagion; employee; entrepreneurial effort; entrepreneurial passion; perceived effort 1. Introduction Entrepreneurial passion is metaphorical “the fire of desire” (Cardon et al., 2009, p. 515) that drives efforts in the context of new venture creation and is therefore essential to research in the field of entrepreneurship (Gielnik et al., 2015). Founders with a high entrepreneurial passion are more creative, motivated, and successful (Cardon et al., 2005,2013; Chen et al., 2009). Effort is another relevant construct in entrepreneurship as it is considered a driver for successful launches of new businesses (Foo et al., 2009). Scholars insist that effort reflects the purpose of mobilizing resources and energy to achieve the desired objective (Dik & Aarts, 2007). They interpret effort as a signal to pursue goals. Consequently, passion and effort are tremendously substantial constructs for successful entrepreneurship. There is much research on how passion influences entrepreneurial effort (Baum et al., 2001; Cardon et al., 2009). While the direction of influence seems intuitively correct to start from emotion like passion leading to behavior like effort (Russell, 2003), Gielnik et al. (2015) found a causal relationship for the other direction: entrepreneurial effort driving entrepreneurial passion. Breugst et al. (2012) paved the way for a new literature stream on entrepreneurial passion. They put the entrepreneur’s employee into the spotlight and researched the effect of perceived entrepreneurial passion on the employees’ commitment toward the nascent venture. They found significant relationships between passion and affective commitment. Moreover, Hubner et al. (2020) researched the effects of perceiving passion. They contend that entrepreneurs can develop in their employees a sense of passion for their tasks, especially if that passion did not exist previously, and enhance performance by expressing passion. However, the work of Breugst et al. (2012) and Hubner et al. (2020) has shown that there is little knowledge of the effects of the employees’ perception of their supervisor in the entrepreneurial context. This research stream, combined with the novel finding of Gielnik et al. (2015) that effort is a factor stimulating DOI: https://doi.org/10.5282/jums/v9i3pp1634-1664 © The Author(s) 2024. Published by Junior Management Science. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International). Open Access funding provided by ZBW. A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1635 entrepreneurial passion, reveals a research gap on how employees’ emotions are affected by the perceptions of their supervisor’s behavior. Therefore, the question arises whether and how the conclusion of Gielnik et al. (2015) holds for the framework provided by scholars like Breugst et al. (2012) or Hubner et al. (2020) with putting the employee in the focus of the analysis. The theoretical framework of this study merges the theoretical approaches of the respective research streams of Breugst et al. (2012) and Gielnik et al. (2015). Similar to the mentioned academic contributions, I will draw on the emotional contagion theory (Hatfield et al., 1993; Platow et al., 2005) to illustrate the transfer of emotions between two individuals. Besides, I use the self-regulation theory (Bandura et al., 1999; Carver & Scheier, 1982; Locke & Latham, 2002) to describe the within-person relationship of effort and passion in the direction that behavior influences emotion. First, relying on emotional contagion theory explains that displayed positive affect by the entrepreneur can generate affective reactions in the employee. Following this theory, affect can be transferred from entrepreneur to employee during social interactions at work, influencing the employee’s emotions. Therefore, perceiving entrepreneurial passion can make employees more passionate about entrepreneurship. Second, applying self-regulation theories explains that effort can trigger positive affect when employees make progress. Progress reduces the discrepancy to the desired goal, which leads to experiencing positive emotions (Carver, 2006). This mechanism indicates that employees can become more passionate about entrepreneurship when they put effort into entrepreneurial tasks. To build the bridge between those theoretical frameworks, I will add the theory on goal contagion (Dik & Aarts, 2008; Palomares, 2013) to point out how perceived effort can trigger the employee’s effort. Goal contagion builds on the priming mechanism (Laurin, 2016). It explains that the employee must perceive an external stimulus that activates a mental representation which he or she then accesses later and adapts as his or her own. Breugst et al. (2012) and Hubner et al. (2020) asked how the perception of entrepreneurial passion can influence employee-level outcomes. Gielnik et al. (2015) questioned the unique direction of passion driving effort while investigating how the reverse effect could occur. As a result of both approaches, I aim to combine both streams and research the effect of perceived supervisor effort on the employee’s entrepreneurial passion. This results in the following research question: How does the employees’ perception of their supervisor’s effort influence the employees’ entrepreneurial passion? I adopted a qualitative methodology to discover an answer to my research question. This approach is effective in research settings with at least limited theory or knowledge about how a process operates, such as in the current research (Lee et al., 1999). I used a multiple case study approach that helps to develop new insights into a research subject that has not yet been thoroughly investigated (Eisenhardt, 1989). A case study technique is a suitable methodology because there is only limited theory on how perceived supervisor effort influences the employees’ entrepreneurial passion. A multiple case study approach helps answer research questions that start with “how” or “why” (Edmondson & McManus, 2007). The unit of analysis I want to investigate is the perception and emotions of current or former employees of small ventures as they are or were in frequent and direct contact with the entrepreneurs (Breugst et al., 2012). Therefore, the bestsuited sample for data collection is the actual entrepreneurial employee. I used theoretical sampling to select the appropriate population for this study (Miles & Huberman, 1994). I video-interviewed eight entrepreneurial employees and used a semi-structured setting that provided flexibility in data collection (Edwards & Holland, 2013). To strengthen the validity of this study, I relied on the triangulation logic (Jick, 1979) and enriched the cases with secondary data. The study makes several contributions to the literature as the interplay of entrepreneurial passion and effort from the employees’ point of view tackles the fields of emotion, behavior, and entrepreneurship. I contribute by using the work of Gielnik et al. (2015) within the framework scholars like Breugst et al. (2012) and Hubner et al. (2020) provided by investigating whether perceived effort can drive passion while focusing on the entrepreneurial employee. My approach results in novel findings for the merged research streams. Besides, this study enriches the research on factors driving entrepreneurial passion as asked for by previous contributions (Cardon et al., 2012; Gielnik et al., 2015; Murnieks et al., 2014). Furthermore, this study contributes to research on leadership as an entrepreneurial task which has not been explored much (Breugst et al., 2012) by showing how the perceived leader behavior can impact the emotions of his employees. Overall, this paper extends the literature by providing a theoretical model that describes how perceived supervisor effort impacts the employees’ entrepreneurial passion and derives testable propositions. The findings suggest that employees’ entrepreneurial passion can be affected by the mere perception of supervisor effort. The perception of the supervisor’s effort can have a noticeable effect on the employee, depending on factors such as initial passion, proximity to the founders, and the entrepreneurial-relatedness of the employees’ tasks. Then, employees perceiving high effort are more likely to put up more effort on their own, which in turn stimulates an increase in entrepreneurial passion. On the other hand, employees who perceive low effort may exert less effort themselves, which leads to a decline in entrepreneurial passion. Additionally, if an employee initially felt less passionate about entrepreneurship, too much effort may cause that passion for waning. Another important finding of this study is that perceptions of strong passion can outweigh perceptions of poor effort, suggesting that perceptions of emotion may significantly impact employees’ emotions more than perceptions of behavior. A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641636 For practitioners, my findings help current employees and entrepreneurs understand the outcome of entrepreneurial passion with perceived effort as an input factor. Then, entrepreneurs can work on their communication skills and show their efforts the right way to achieve changes in the entrepreneurial passion of their employees. As many firms want their employees to have an entrepreneurial mindset, developing the employees’ entrepreneurial passion is highly beneficial. Employees with high entrepreneurial passion could improve innovation, develop inventions, or start a venture inside the firm. 2. Theory This contribution aims to investigate the effects of the perception of an entrepreneur’s effort on the employees’ entrepreneurial passion. Current research provides knowledge that paves the way for three different possible paths. Taken together, they can explain how the perception of entrepreneurial effort can affect the entrepreneurial passion experienced by the employees. Two paths are interpersonal as they describe how the transfer of passion or effort from an entrepreneur to an employee occurs. The third path is intrapersonal and describes how passion develops through effort. Literature found answers to how passion transfers from one person to another via perception and its effects (Breugst et al., 2012; Brundin et al., 2008; Cardon, 2008; Hubner et al., 2020) (Path I). Moreover, another stream of literature focused on how effort and goals transfer between people through perception (Aarts et al., 2004; Breugst et al., 2020; Dik & Aarts, 2007,2008; Loersch et al., 2008; Palomares, 2013) (Path II). Finally, scholars found out about the counterintuitive intrapersonal path from effort influencing passion in entrepreneurship (Gielnik et al., 2015; Lex et al., 2020) (Path III). They diverge from the thought that emotions drive behavior (Russell, 2003) but converge on emotions as a feedback system (Baumeister et al., 2007). This system allows us to account for emotion as the output of behavior. Combining these literature streams will bring us closer to answering the research question. In this study, the first path, which describes a transfer of emotion, works without additional considerations. However, the second path, which describes a transfer of behavior, and the third path, which describes how behavior stimulates emotion, act as a unit in this framework. First, I will define and describe the core concepts of this work: entrepreneurial passion, effort, and the entrepreneurial employee. As this work studies entrepreneurial passion, entrepreneurial effort, and the entrepreneurial employee, it is vital to have a common understanding of them and look at the established knowledge of these concepts and subjects in the literature. Second, I will review the literature on the three paths starting from entrepreneurial effort leading to the employees’ entrepreneurial passion and show the current state of research. Third, I will explain the relevant theories for the different paths to understand how perceived effort can develop into entrepreneurial passion. 2.1. Entrepreneurial effort, passion, and the employee 2.1.1. Entrepreneurial passion Scholars agree on the importance of passion in the entrepreneurial context (Cardon et al., 2013; Gielnik et al., 2015; Lex et al., 2019; Murnieks et al., 2014). However, the definition of passion varies across academics. While Baum and Locke (2004) define passion as the love for one’s work, other scholars emphasize the attraction to engage in certain activities in their definitions (Philippe et al., 2010; Vallerand et al., 2003). Literature concurs on the emotional dimension of passion (Chen et al., 2009) and defines entrepreneurial passion as intense and positive emotions felt during entrepreneurial tasks (Cardon et al., 2009; Drnovsek et al., 2016; Hubner et al., 2020). As entrepreneurial passion is affective by nature (Cardon et al., 2009), this paper looks at it as a phenomenon of experience during certain activities than as a trait of an entrepreneur, which is in line with current literature (Cardon et al., 2013; Vallerand et al., 2003). For this academic contribution, I decompose entrepreneurial passion as a strong, positive, and affective emotion toward entrepreneurial tasks. These emotions are not exclusive to the entrepreneur but can be experienced by employees too, which is then called employee passion response (Hubner et al., 2020). The literature distinguishes between three types of entrepreneurial passion: passion for inventing, passion for founding, and passion for developing (Breugst et al., 2012; Cardon et al., 2009,2013). Passion for inventing includes identifying and exploring the market for new business opportunities to develop and invent new products, services, and prototypes. Passion for founding arises when passion occurs in creating new ventures to exploit specific opportunities. Expanding and extending a business after its creation is part of the passion for developing. Entrepreneurial passion is related to different characteristics. For instance, entrepreneurial passion contributes to the success of entrepreneurs (Breugst et al., 2012), precisely their success in starting and managing a business (Cardon et al., 2009), and to the growth and success of startups (Baum & Locke, 2004; Cardon et al., 2017; Drnovsek et al., 2016). Besides, scholars describe passion as a driver for motivation (Cardon et al., 2005; Chen et al., 2009) while having effects on creativity (Baron, 2008; Cardon, 2008) and commitment (Breugst et al., 2012). Furthermore, entrepreneurial passion is connected to evaluations, fundraising (Mitteness et al., 2012), and recruiting essential employees (Cardon, 2008). However, the most relevant characteristic of passion for this paper is that passion is contagious, which is one core assumption in entrepreneurship literature (e.g., Hubner et al. 2020). It means that employees can perceive and catch the passion of the entrepreneur. Emotional contagion theory explains this phenomenon. 2.1.2. Entrepreneurial effort People say that if someone wants to achieve something, they must put effort into it. Nowadays, people speak of effort as the engine to achieve goals. According to Dik and A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1637 Aarts (2007), effort mirrors the intention to mobilize energy and resources to accomplish the desired goal. They see effort as a signal for motivational goal pursuit. In entrepreneurship, this means that people inside an organization work intensively on entrepreneurial tasks to pursue and attain specific desired goals (Foo et al., 2009). For this paper, I define entrepreneurial effort concurrently to literature as intensive work in entrepreneurial tasks to reach entrepreneurial goals. Entrepreneurs and employees can perform entrepreneurial tasks, which is standard practice in startups nowadays. Effort is often connected to success and confidence. The rationale is that the more effort someone puts into a task, the higher the likelihood of succeeding (Bandura et al., 1999; Lex et al., 2019). If people believe in their skills and abilities to succeed in entrepreneurial tasks, they are more likely to intensify their work and thus be successful (Gatewood et al., 2002). Entrepreneurial tasks embody goals to give the entrepreneurial effort the necessary direction and clarity (Cardon et al., 2009). People who put effort into a particular task to achieve a goal express how important their goals are to them and how much they value them (Corcoran et al., 2020; Dik & Aarts, 2008). Similarly to passion, effort is contagious (Breugst et al., 2020), meaning that, in the entrepreneurial context, effort is transferable from the entrepreneur to the employee. Goal contagion theory, supported by theory on social motivation, can explain this mechanism. 2.1.3. Entrepreneurial employee As the operating environment for firms becomes more complex and dynamic, given fast and discontinuous change, the whole organization has to act entrepreneurially (Hitt, 2000). Although employees play a different role compared to the entrepreneur as they have not found the firm, they can also be involved and put effort into entrepreneurial tasks and, therefore, experience passion while engaging them. Employees in new ventures take on entrepreneurial tasks regularly by themselves or collaborate closely with the entrepreneur when working on entrepreneurial processes, for example, during entrepreneurial opportunity development or when contributing with their innovative ideas (Hubner et al., 2020). A relevant research stream tries to understand the phenomena occurring when employees act entrepreneurially inside a firm (e.g., Moriano et al. 2014). Intrapreneurship supports the idea of employees participating in entrepreneurial tasks. Consistent with previous research, this paper highlights the role of the employee and his perception of the entrepreneur in the context of research on entrepreneurial passion (e.g., Breugst et al. 2012; Brundin et al. 2008; Hubner et al. 2020) and therefore aligns with the call from Cardon (2008) to extend the literature in that area. Researching what employees perceive of their supervisors is essential as this perception may implicate their behavior (Dik & Aarts, 2007). Brundin et al. (2008) argued for the importance of employees who think and act as entrepreneurs as they create new knowledge, products, and services and discover valuable business opportunities In nascent ventures, employees perceive a close relation to their supervisors and hence feel responsible for and highly involved in entrepreneurial activities while they develop a passion for them (Breugst et al., 2012). As passionate entrepreneurs are crucial to venture success and employees are also vital for the performance of new ventures (e.g., Hayton 2003), Cardon (2008) deducted that passionate employees are beneficial. Furthermore, employees can also benefit from the positive characteristics of having entrepreneurial passion, so passionate employees may be more creative or motivated than employees with less passion who, in addition, are less successful at work tasks (Ho & Pollack, 2014). 2.2. Paths from perceived entrepreneurial effort to employee entrepreneurial passion 2.2.1. Contagion of entrepreneurial passion (Path I) Cardon (2008) delivered the starting point in research on the contagion of entrepreneurial passion to employees and stated it as “a new area of inquiry in the field of entrepreneurship” (Cardon, 2008, p. 84). She summarized the literature’s opinion on the importance of passion for entrepreneurial success. Cardon further argued that having passionate employees is also relevant and deducted how entrepreneurs could transfer their passion to increase the employees’ passion. She argued that entrepreneurs display their passion and used emotional contagion theory to describe the process of passion transfer. Brundin et al. (2008) conducted empirical research to explore the connection between the supervisor’s emotional display and the employees’ willingness to act entrepreneurially. Although passion was not explicitly stated and measured as an emotion in that paper, it fits into their category of positive emotions. Satisfaction also finds a place, as positive emotions are typical for passion. For their experiment, they collected data from 91 employees from 31 different small Swedish firms who were in frequent contact with the CEO. Overall, they claimed that displaying positive emotions from the entrepreneur would “put employees in positive moods with respect to their entrepreneurial motivation” (Brundin et al., 2008, p. 238). Breugst et al. (2012) extended the work of Brundin et al. (2008), participated in the research stream of entrepreneurial passion, and investigated the impacts of perceived entrepreneurial passion on the employees’ commitment to new ventures. They analyzed how the perception of entrepreneurial passion for inventing, developing, and founding affects employee commitment. To explain the phenomenon, they used emotional contagion and goal-setting theory. They argued that perceived passion leads to the experience of positive affect at work and affects goal clarity. Then, the constructs of positive affect at work and goal clarity affect employee commitment. The result showed a positive relationship between passion for inventing and developing with venture commitment, while passion for founding is negatively associated with that construct. They explain this negative association as entrepreneurs who are passionate A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641638 about founding may signal their employees that they might leave the firm to start another one again. Besides, they claimed that the affective path showed a higher magnitude than the path via goal clarity through their data which is in line with other scholars who highlight the affective nature of passion (e.g., Cardon 2008). They measured these effects by conducting a quantitative study through a survey, receiving responses from employees from over 100 early-stage ventures. They also found out that the venture stage does not influence the impact of perceived entrepreneurial passion. Hubner et al. (2020) enriched the literature on the contagion of entrepreneurial passion and its effect on employees. Again, scholars used emotional contagion theory to explain the mechanism of entrepreneurial passion transfer from the entrepreneur to the employee. They were the first to empirically demonstrate the contagion mechanism of entrepreneurial passion using two complementary studies. In the first field study, they matched cross-sectional survey data from German employees with their supervisors, where they received over 200 responses. In the second study, conducted through an experimental design, they hired 321 freelance workers from an online platform and told them that a real entrepreneur hired them. Then, they watched video messages that contained the manipulation for entrepreneurial passion where they got their tasks explained. Their findings suggested that the contagion of passion exists, leading the employees to put extra effort into their tasks and enhance other work-related outcomes. They reasoned that a higher employee passion response makes employees invest more energy into accomplishing entrepreneurial tasks as they connect these tasks to positive emotions, which then results in higher commitment towards the tasks (Breugst et al., 2012; Visser et al., 2013). According to them, entrepreneurs can make their employees passionate about entrepreneurial tasks, especially when they have not been passionate beforehand, and also stimulate their work performance (e.g., effort). To summarize, entrepreneurship research acknowledges the importance of entrepreneurial passion and its contagious nature. Scholars found out that passion is transferrable between people. In entrepreneurship, passion can transfer from the entrepreneur to the employee. Furthermore, the literature also stated that the perception of entrepreneurial passion or related emotions might also trigger subsequent beneficial behavior, for example, commitment or the willingness to act entrepreneurially. Therefore, employees may perceive their supervisors’ entrepreneurial passion and become passionate about entrepreneurial tasks. Emotional contagion theory describes the working mechanism of this phenomenon, which I will explain later. 2.2.2. Contagion of goals and the role of perceived effort (Path II) Literature on goal contagion assumes that people connect other people’s goals to their behavior. Aarts et al. (2004) investigated how and under which circumstances goal contagion occurs. They tested for goal contagion in six different experimental designs in their contribution. They exposed their participants to written scenarios of goals on a computer screen, for example, to make money. Afterward, in a behavioral setting, they tested for the goal contagion of the participants. In that setting, the participants could strive for the goal. However, it required a different behavior than that provided in the written scenario, so they could rule out that the participants mimicked the presented actions. They used Dutch undergraduate students as a randomly assigned control or goal condition group sample. Overall, they provided the foundation for other scholars to build on goal contagion theory as they found strong support in their data for their hypothesis that people unconsciously take on the goals implied by other people. They claimed that people might become more similar in what they want and hence what they plan for the future when goal contagion occurs. Furthermore, they found out that goals pursued under unacceptable ways or conditions or with improper manners become less desirable, and goal contagion becomes less likely to occur. Dik and Aarts (2007, p. 728) advanced this idea by highlighting the role of perceived effort in goal contagion as a “basic characteristic of motivational goal-directed behavior” that facilitates the occurrence of goal contagion. They see perceived effort as a cue to other people’s goals. This cue helps the perceiver to account for the goal-directed behavior and thus helps to discover the specific goals that motivate the acting agent. With the help of a self-produced video that implied the goal of helping, they built an experimental study to test for the impact of perceived effort on goal contagion. The sample for this study consisted of overall 116 Dutch undergraduate students. The video showed a large ball that tried to help another smaller ball to free a stuck kite out of a tree. The ball had to search for a ladder inside a room with four doors. The number of doors manipulated the ball’s effort to open to access the ladder. Then, they exposed their participants to a word completion task where they had to come up with the word help to check if the goal of helping was accessed successfully. Additionally, the manipulation check was conducted by asking the participants how much effort the ball had put into searching for the ladder. They later conducted a similar second study, replacing the word completion task with a lexical decision task to ensure that goal inference occurred spontaneously without the participants’ conscious awareness. During a third experiment, they wanted to find evidence of changes in actual behavior after watching the animated films. After being exposed to the same videos as in the previous experiments, they asked their participants if they wanted to fill out another questionnaire without getting a reward for their participation. They could freely decide if they wanted to leave the laboratory or if they wanted to volunteer without being asked to help directly. The data on this experiment showed that perceiving more effort led the participants to a stronger pursuit of the goal. All in all, their findings propose a linear relationship between effort and goal inferences. The more effort is shown, the more accessible the goal for the perceiver of this effortful behavior. A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1639 In a subsequent study, Dik and Aarts (2008) investigated whether the perception of another peoples effort to attain a goal that might be yet unknown to the perceiver triggers the perceiver’s motivation to find out about the goal. They assumed that an effortful behavior signalizes the goal as valuable to the pursuer. To test their hypothesis, they used three experiments where Dutch undergraduate students observed an agent who pursued an unrevealed goal with either low, medium, or high effort. Afterward, they tested the participants’ motivation to infer the unknown goal. The two experiments used a text comprehension task and an animated film to demonstrate an agent’s effortful behavior and let them self-capture their motivation for goal inference. In the third experiment, they used a clicking task on a computer connected to the animated film of the previous experiment as a behavioral measure to account for goal inference motivation. Thereby, they extended their study by adding actual behavior in a spontaneous manner. They found evidence for the perceived effort to be connected to goal inference: “people become more motivated to find out the goal of an actor’s behavior whenever this behavior is characterized by more effort.” (Dik & Aarts, 2008, p. 750). They further argue that goal inference is essential in collaborative tasks and that other people’s goals are a relevant source of environmental information. For them, the motivation to infer goals is the basis for goal contagion, which is enhanced by the perception of effortful behavior. In the context of goal contagion, Loersch et al. (2008) investigated the understanding of the role of group belonging. They hypothesized that it is more likely for goal contagion to occur when the actor and the perceiver belong to the same group. In their study, they showed their participants self-created videos of people playing racquetball with either competitive or cooperative behavior. In the competitive version, the actors played more intensely, while in the cooperative version, they played more slowly with less intention to win the game and instead kept the ball up in the air. They labeled the videos so the participants could categorize the actors as joint group members. They did this in the shared group membership version by showing an overlay in the video with the text of the respective university of the participants who were students. Afterward, they measured the goal activation by asking the participants to imagine themselves being a coach at an American football team and devise a strategy to win a game. The researchers categorized the provided strategies by competitiveness. They found a significant relationship between goal contagion and group membership. Those who viewed competitive behavior by members of their group wanted to implement a more competitive strategy than the others, whereas there was no difference in the non-membership group. Palomares (2013) further validated research on goal contagion as he was the first to study authentic conversations after the effect’s examination in written scenarios or videos. He argued for its importance because goal contagion “[is]highly social and rooted in interaction” (Palomares, 2013, p. 76). He let undergraduate students in the US form conversations with each other where one had to perceive what the other had to strive for a goal. The pursuer received a three-level goal to test for goal specificity. Then, the perceiver filled out a questionnaire to test for goal contagion. Overall, he claimed his study to be a successful support and replication of the study of Aarts et al. (2004) but in a more natural and realistic setting. Breugst et al. (2020) investigated the contagion of effort in new venture management teams, taking the research into the entrepreneurship context. They based their work on social motivation theory, suggesting that effort is contagious. However, they tested the boundaries of social motivation theory to see under which circumstances contagion is hampered or facilitated. In a longitudinal study, they collected data through surveys from 161 cofounders of 64 different teams managing early-stage ventures. In their research, they found out that when a teammate puts effort into the startup, it plays an essential role in triggering the effort of the focal manager. Although they did not find support for contagion to happen automatically, they found effort contagious at the management level of new venture teams when threats emerge. These threats are a low performance of the own venture and environmental hostility. To conclude, research acknowledges that people put effort into tasks to achieve specific goals, and these goals, as well as their efforts, can be transferred from one person to another. As these effects are more robust if the people belong to the same group, this idea also applies to the entrepreneur and his employee. Literature found evidence that people can infer the goals of others, find them valuable and start to pursue them by themselves and, thus, put effort into tasks. If they already perceive higher levels of effort from the agent, these goals are more likely to transfer. Goal contagion theory explains this phenomenon’s working mechanism, which I will present later. In addition to the role of effort in making goal contagion more likely, effort is also contagious. Although scholars investigated this with new venture management teams as the unit of analysis, the arguments presented also hold for the context of the employee-entrepreneur relationship as they often collaborate closely in small ventures. Therefore, perceiving entrepreneurial effort can make the employee increase his or her effort on entrepreneurial tasks through goal and effort contagion. 2.2.3. Impact of effort on entrepreneurial passion (Path III) When talking about feelings and behavior, it seems intuitive that behavior follows emotion. We often say that people do certain things because they feel a certain way. When Russell (2003) theorized about the psychological construction of emotion, he argued that emotional states influence behavior. Foo et al. (2009) studied how feelings influence effort in the entrepreneurial context. They focused on the affecteffort link because entrepreneurship is an affective process and effort is a significant factor for new venture success. They argued, using self-regulation theory, that negative affect is a sign of slower progress, and thus entrepreneurs will increase subsequent effort. Positive affect, on the other side, A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641640 signalizes that things are going well and opens the scope of attention. They hypothesized that positive affect leads entrepreneurs to focus more on the future, which results in them engaging with extra effort in venture tasks beyond what is required immediately. They tested their hypothesis using an experience sampling methodology with a sample of 46 entrepreneurs who had to fill out short surveys on their phones multiple times a week. Overall, they found support in the data for their claims. Baumeister et al. (2007) contradict the predominant view by arguing that emotions occur in feedback loops where they can emerge as descendants of people’s behavior. They assume that all psychological processes (e.g., emotion) exist to influence behavior partly but not directly. They theorized that emotion influences behavior through a feedback system. They used the example of guilt to explain their theory. In the example, they describe a person who causes distress to a friend, so he or she feels guilty afterward. Because of the experienced guilt, the person thinks about what he or she has done wrong to avoid a similar feeling in the future. If there is a similar situation next time, the person may adapt his or her behavior so that it does not cause distress. So, first, there was the behavior, then there was the emotion which resulted in a change in later behavior to avoid this emotion. They argue that emotion as feedback is helpful to modify behavior and, therefore, also valuable for goal pursuit as behavior directs toward a goal. The behavior will be adjusted in goal pursuit to experience more positive emotions as they signalize progress toward a cherished goal. Gielnik et al. (2015) followed this view by claiming that it is not only emotion that drives behavior, but it is also behavior that drives emotion. Notably, they investigated how entrepreneurial effort influences entrepreneurial passion and found evidence for effort to predict changes in passion. They draw upon theories of self-regulation, that is, control, goalsetting, and social cognitive theory, to explain the underlying mechanisms. They conducted a field study over eight weeks to find support for their claims. Their sample consisted of 54 German entrepreneurs who had to complete an online survey weekly where they should report their work-related effort and passion. Additionally, they run a laboratory experiment to further investigate the causal chain from effort to passion. Therefore, they took undergraduate students who first completed a questionnaire to capture entrepreneurial passion and the commitment to invest effort. Afterward, they received the task of developing a business idea into a more mature business plan. After completing this task, they had to complete a second and third survey that served as manipulation checks and outcome variables as entrepreneurial passion was measured. To manipulate effort, they varied the working time for the task. Overall, their findings indicate that entrepreneurial effort predicts changes in entrepreneurial passion. New venture progress as a mediator of this effect and free choice as a moderator of the mediated effect provides the underlying causal link. Other scholars like Lex et al. (2020) based their work on this idea. They accepted effort as an antecedent of entrepreneurial passion while using self-regulation theories to cover new models on the development of passion in entrepreneurship over time. They posit that passion develops in a feedback loop dependent on entrepreneurial self-efficacy and performance. Then, this performance gets cognitively evaluated. To test their model, they used 65 entrepreneurs from Tanzania across their first study’s three phases of the entrepreneurial process. They collected data through structured interviews in person as wells as through questionnaires after the interview and a subsequent questionnaire later in the process. Data collection resulted in three different measurements for each participant during the study. Their first study provided evidence of entrepreneurial performance’s impact on positive feelings. Their second study aimed to extend those findings. There, they offered an entrepreneurship training program over 12 weeks to simulate all stages and significant tasks of entrepreneurship. The sample consisted of 150 Tanzanian students, and data was collected through questionnaires by the end of each training week. Their results replicated the findings from the first study successfully. They extended them by providing evidence for the influence of entrepreneurial performance on identity centrality, another antecedent of passion, over the more extended 12week period. They conducted a third study to generalize and extend the present findings to provide evidence for the mediation effect of entrepreneurial self-efficacy between the effect of entrepreneurial performance on positive feelings. They used a similar methodology to the second study but adapted the time frame and the questionnaires to account for the mediation effect. They found support in the collected data for their hypothesis. Overall, they found support for their recursive and reciprocal model of the development of passion over time. According to their model, passion develops due to evaluating one’s performance, with entrepreneurial self-efficacy mediating this relationship. They would answer the question of what came first, passion or performance, the following: “[...]passion and performance develop jointly and iteratively over time in a circular manner, not necessarily with a starting point inherent to unidirectional relationships.” (Lex et al., 2020, p. 26). All in all, literature has differing views on what came first, the emotion or the behavior. One stream of the literature assumes that entrepreneurial passion influences entrepreneurial effort, while the other stream makes the assumption of the opposite direction valid. The view on entrepreneurial passion as part of a feedback system brings both views together and lets them exist concurrently. Therefore, entrepreneurial passion may influence entrepreneurial effort, but it may also be true that entrepreneurial passion arises through the mere exertion of effort on entrepreneurial tasks. For the employee, this means that while working on entrepreneurial tasks, he may become passionate about those tasks. Theories on self-regulation, namely control, goal-setting, and social cognition theory, can explain this phenomenon. A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1641 2.3. Explaining theories: how and why the three paths work 2.3.1. Contagion of goals and emotions I use theories of emotional and goal contagion to explain two different ways in which the perceived behavior of the entrepreneur effects the employee passion response. Theories on contagion will explain the interpersonal effects from the entrepreneur to the employee. Although both theories are not the same, they describe how either the emotion of passion or the behavior of effort is transferable from one individual to another. Literature defines contagion as “a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes” (Schoenewolf, 1990, p. 50). Contagion, therefore, describes that perceived emotions and behaviors of others can influence the own emotions and behavior. I use emotional contagion theory to explain how the perception of an entrepreneur’s passion at work triggers an employee’s passion response. I use goal contagion to describe how effort is carried from one person to another through working on goals. Goal contagion To understand goal contagion, suppose that the employee and the entrepreneur of a small new venture sit in the same office and close to each other. They frequently interact during the workday and can engage with each other often. The employee and the supervisor work closely together on the same tasks to achieve specific goals to help the firm in making process and succeed. During these close engagements, the entrepreneur will often set the goals or formulate them with the employee in collaboration. Due to the close collaboration, the employee will perceive that the entrepreneur puts effort into the stated goals and will see himself in the same boat as his supervisor. According to goal contagion theory, the employee may see the goals now as his own and will work intensively on the tasks to achieve them. Therefore, effort transfers from the entrepreneur to the employee. Concurrently, everyday life shows us the phenomenon: we get inspired by other people, especially if they have a higher position. When we observe how inspiring people reach their goals, we sometimes try to set similar goals and develop similar behavior to achieve them. When the younger brother perceives that the older brother is writing good grades at school while spending much time studying, the younger brother will likely try to spend more time in preparation to write better grades. Aarts et al. (2004, p. 24) summarized the definition of the term goal from literature and described it as “a mental representation of the desired state that may pertain to a behavior [...]or an outcome [...]”. An example of the behavior can be entrepreneurial effort, and an example of the outcome can be the success of the entrepreneurial firm. They further describe the process of goal contagion as “automatic adoption and pursuit of goals that others are perceived to strive for” (Aarts et al., 2004, p. 24). Automatic means that the process starts without the need for consciousness or intention of the employee. According to them, the perception of behavior triggers goal contagion. Furthermore, Dik and Aarts (2008) supported that idea by theorizing that goals become desirable for a person by observing others working hard on their achievement. Empirical findings of other scholars give additional evidence for this idea (e.g., Corcoran et al. 2020). The working mechanism of goal contagion is that of a priming phenomenon that needs three conditions to occur (Laurin, 2016). First, the employee must perceive an external stimulus that activates a mental representation. An example of an external stimulus in our case can be that the employee sees his entrepreneur spending much time on product innovation, so the employee will infer that the entrepreneur’s goal is to bring a new product to the market to increase firm performance. The external stimulus is the entrepreneur, and the mental representation is the goal. Second, the goal has to remain accessible for a particular duration after its activation, which depends on the motivational relevance (Eitam & Higgins, 2010). In our example, the employee has to perceive the entrepreneur working on the mentioned tasks frequently, and he has to care to some degree about the goals. As the employee is in the same firm as his supervisor, he has a personal interest in the firm performing well. Third, the perceiver must misattribute the accessibility of the mental representation as own desire (Loersch & Payne, 2014). When the employee later tries to investigate how he can contribute to firm performance by doing product innovation, he may misattribute that this was his supervisor’s goal and assume that he now wants to pursue his own firm performance goal. Perceived effort is a catalyst for goal contagion to occur. The literature stated that it is more likely for someone to infer the goal of the other if one sees the other putting more effort into a task (Dik & Aarts, 2007,2008; Palomares, 2013). The reason is that the perceiver will interpret the goal as of higher value due to the high effort put into the task by the other (Kruger et al., 2004). Furthermore, goal contagion is a highly social process that requires human interaction (Palomares, 2013). Human interaction happens more often between in-group members (e.g., entrepreneur and employee of the same firm) than among out-group members leading to goals being more contagious inside the same group (Loersch et al., 2008). The theory of social motivation supports the theory of goal contagion inside social groups. It states that individuals in social situations behave reciprocally in collective tasks meaning that if a person does something for someone else, the other feels obligated to return the favor (Breugst et al., 2020; Geen, 1991). Following social motivation theory, first, the employee will engage in social comparison processes with the entrepreneur and thus try to match the invested effort. Second, he will try to comply with the standards set by the entrepreneur and view his behavior as a benchmark for his own. A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641648 about their teams and products on YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Besides, I looked at the supervisors’ and interviewees’ educational and professional backgrounds on LinkedIn and other material I found about them, like their websites or blogs, publications, articles in certain magazines, or interviews they conducted to enhance my understanding of their personalities. Additionally, the participants showed me presentation decks of their respective companies, which I was allowed to take notes on but not to use afterward in my data analysis as a separate file. Finally, I looked on the internet for further interviews with employees of the respective firms for deeper insights and validating statements. To collect these data, I utilized Google as a search engine and applied a keyword strategy using operators such as “and” and “or” to account for aspects and synonyms. Then, I created a matrix for defining and tracking search terms to combine different wordings and languages to create specific search queries. To form a search term, for example, I took the name of one of the ventures and added the words interview and employee with the connector “and” to look for employee interviews of this firm. I used a webpage-to-pdf converter (Print Friendly & PDF) or the print function of the Google Chrome web browser to scrape the information from the different sources and make it usable for data analysis software later in the process. For video or audio material, I used a software named Trint which delivers artificial intelligencebased transcripts with a sufficient accuracy rate to save time in the data collection process and make it usable for further analysis. This kind of data collection technique is commonly accepted and used by scholars (e.g., Gehman et al. 2018). Secondary data helped verify the interviewees’ self-reported claims and the characteristics of their entrepreneurs and increased the overall confidence in the accuracy of the findings. It supported me in understanding the participants’ working environment as they sometimes needed help to give certain information on a specific topic because they could not remember or did not mention it during the interview, although I asked them. Table 2summarizes which data source I used for every case. 3.3. Data analysis Although I knew I wanted to identify patterns relating to how perceived effort affected employees’ entrepreneurial passion while coding, I tried to approach the data with an open mind and no preconceived notions (Suddaby, 2006). I could therefore find notions that were related to the research issue. When reading through the transcripts and secondary data for the first time, I decided against immediately starting the analyzing process because I wanted to become more familiar with the data and get a better sense of the big picture. It was necessary because one challenge was avoiding bias while processing the collected data (Eisenhardt, 1989). In order to make sure I did not miss anything, I started coding as soon as I finished reading through the data for the second time. To confirm the codes, I coded each unit of data twice. I mixed bottom-up with top-down coding as I do not generate new theory but work in existing theoretical frames and want to allow the narrative to emerge inside this frame from the raw data. Therefore, I anticipated some codes derived from the research question and the theoretical framework I work in that I might use later for building my model and started with the most core concepts of my research: perceived entrepreneurial effort, perceived entrepreneurial passion, entrepreneurial effort, and entrepreneurial passion of the employee. Then, I organized the data inside this categorization with an open coding strategy (Corbin & Strauss, 1990). I coded each statement I believed to be helpful to deepen the insights and subsequently be grouped with other statements and secondary data. By identifying and grouping text units belonging to the same concepts, I allocated codes to statements. Labeling statements produced numerous first-order codes. The first-order codes’ complex narratives are the foundation for a more theoretical and analytical view of the data than just a descriptive one. To organize the first-order codes which emerged from open coding, I followed an axial coding approach (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) to find differences and similarities between the categorized data parts. I processed this by connecting the first-order codes and grouping them into categories that produce a logical whole. It reduced the number of codes and resulted in a better overview of the information pieces. In this step, I sought to aggregate codes into higher-order concepts to pave the way to the corresponding literature and theory. It resulted in the creation of second-order codes. An investigation of this kind enables the discovery of potential underlying dimensions or patterns in the data. Next, I used selective coding to the emergent patterns in the data to extract the theoretically explanatory dimensions (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) and build the bridge back to my initial coding scheme considerations. The final phase of my analysis started with abstracting themes into higher-order theoretical dimensions. I iterated back and forth between my interpretations and the data to ensure the former held. I iteratively worked on the data coding using MAXQDA (Version: Plus 2022, Release 22.3.0) as my comprehension of the research issue grew and deepened (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). As a result, whenever I developed new insights into the material, I had to re-check the coding scheme. It involved renaming first-order codes and re-clustering my codes into subcategories. This process follows the replication logic for the multiple case approach, as every single case can be observed independently and not as an additional data point (Eisenhardt, 2021). Therefore, I tested every case for the emergent theory’s occurrence, which helped me gain familiarity with data and preliminary theory development. It also helped to identify patterns across the cases. Observing every single case on its own encouraged me to look past my first impression and consider the evidence from various angles, to form relationships and investigate the underlying mechanism. I updated the codes regularly during the analysis following this procedure. It means I added new codes while dropping other codes in the process. During data analysis, I A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1649 Table 2: Overview of used data types for the sample cases Case Interview Data CV CV Founders Website Information Other Employee Interviews Articles Founder Interviews Other information JG 8 pages Yes 3 CVs 37 pages 28 pages - - - GD 8 pages Yes 4 CVs 35 pages - 4 pages - 6 pages RB 10 pages Yes 3 CVs 8 pages 12 pages 6 pages - 64 pages MS 10 pages Yes 3 CVs 13 pages - - 13 pages 18 pages CH 8 pages Yes 4 CVs 17 pages - - 16 pages 26 pages JK 10 pages Yes 3 CVs 9 pages - 11 pages - 1 page LL 10 pages Yes 3 CVs 8 pages 12 pages - - 4 pages AW 7 pages Yes 2 CVs 47 pages - 7 pages 3 pages - regularly iterated between the emergent theory and the data to compare existing knowledge with new information to close the research gap, as recommended by Eisenhardt (2021). Overall, the coding and analysis process was done iteratively and repeatedly before ending up with a final scheme and analysis (Miles & Huberman, 1994). This strategy helped me gain new insights from the data I might have missed if I had only gone through it once. Besides, I asked a colleague to check and agree on the meaning of the codes and the correspondent data. Double-checking enhanced the accuracy of my findings. Together we re-evaluated the data, committed to discussions, and converged interpretations if there were discrepancies over specific codes. As the last step, I compared all data to the final coding scheme at the end of the analysis process. Figure 2shows an excerpt of the data structure scheme. The complete list of codes, with explanations and examples for every code, and the code structure, is shown in Appendix A3. 4. Findings To assure the promised anonymity and confidentiality for the interviewed people and their respective firms and founders, I replaced their names with acronyms of randomized names, for example, JG derived from John Grey. When I write about the company that JG works for, I refer to it as JG_Company, adding an underscore and the word company to the respective name. The same holds for the founder of the respective firm, who will be referred to as JG_Founder if there is only one founder, and if there are multiple ones, I will add a number suffix to the name, for example, JG_Founder_1 representing one founder and JG_Founder_2 representing an additional founder. The numbers resemble an order of proximity to the founder, meaning that JG worked closer with JG_Founder_1 than with JG_Founder_2. I used this naming convention for every data related to the correspondent interview partner. 4.1. Case descriptions and within-case analyses 4.1.1. The case of JG JG is 28 years old and studied computer science and business administration in his bachelor’s and master’s programs at a large university. During his studies, he wanted to explore the everyday life of a startup and joined a young venture for one year overall as his first job. The firm operates in data security. They consult within these topics as and offer small software solutions to provide the regulatory standards that small and medium-sized companies need. The firm was founded by another firm that hired three experienced CEOs to build and grow the startup. As JG joined the company in its first year after its foundation in 2017, his tasks were broad. His primary focus was working in sales and generating as many leads as possible to acquire new potential customers for the firm securing a deal with them. Because of his IT background, he could support requirements analysis for software selection, processing incoming trouble tickets, and even programming. Overall, he acted additionally as an assistant to the CEOs as he supported them with their daily work and even had to search for another office as the firm started to grow. JG cooperated mostly with JG_Founder_1. She brought in much working experience as she had previously worked as a business analyst in consulting and as a head of corporate sales for another startup in the food industry. In the end, JG left the company to explore another challenge at an IT consultancy, where he still works nowadays and is enjoying his job. After working for the startup, he never got in touch with other small ventures. Before working for this company, JG had no touching points with startups or entrepreneurship. He mentioned that generally, he would like the idea of founding his own company one day if he finds an appropriate IT-related product and could imagine taking the necessary tradeoffs like not earning much in the beginning. All in all, he started with a low passion for entrepreneurship in comparison to the other participants. JG perceived his founders to put high effort into their tasks and the venture. He reported that his founders always were willing to go the extra mile “without exception” and that he has “never seen them going home or coming to work ever” due to the long working hours he perceived. Besides, he received emails and task descriptions on the weekends and estimates for his supervisors additional “12 hours or 8 hours normal working time on Saturdays and Sundays”. He perceived high entrepreneurial passion from his founders. He A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641650 Figure 2: Excerpt of data structure described JG_Founder_1 as “very passionate and very extroverted” who always had to “drop and leave everything else aside” when she had an idea and pushed for immediate implementation as she “really fell in love with her ideas and pushed them towards the end.”. JG claimed that this behavior influenced him as he “therefore stayed often longer in the office” to collaborate with JG_Founder_1 on her ideas. He reasoned that he increased his effort because of his passion for the tasks. He also mentioned that progress made his supervisor happier, and “she seemed to be very interested in this progress. That was actually the passion that made [him]stay longer because [he] knew that it was very important to her and that she was extremely happy when there was progress.”. Overall, JG increased his level of effort while working for JG_Company as he “was almost always willing, if [he]had no other obligations [...]to go the extra mile and also stay late at the office.”. However, he did not enjoy this amount of effort after a few months because he either “wanted to do other stuff,” and “had other interests than sitting in the office with the founders after 11 pm” or disliked the expectancy of “continuously staying until 11 pm the next day too”. He realized that this is not the working schedule that fits in his life and therefore chose to join a firm where he had a stable 40-hoursweek. He described that this experience “brought [him]further away from founding a venture” which fits the fact that he never showed interest to the entrepreneurial process afterward. To sum up, JG perceived much entrepreneurial effort and passion, which made him increase the effort he put into his tasks while working with the founders. However, this amount of effort decreased his passion for entrepreneurship. 4.1.2. The case of GD GD is 29 years old and was referred to this study by JG from his network. GD earned a degree from a Turkish university in computer engineering. Her long-term goals, which she also mentions on her social media accounts, are to start a business, become a strong tech woman, and create cuttingedge technology. After working as a software developer for a Turkish company, she moved to Germany four years ago to start working for the GD_Company, a startup operating in the medical sector. There, she is still working as a software developer. She joined the firm as one of the first ten employees. GD saw the startup grow to 450 employees, but a Swedish company acquired the company during this period. The initial founders dropped out after the acquisition and got replaced by two managers. GD_Founder_1 and GD_Founder_2 founded the firm in the first place with more than 30 years of combined working experience in relevant fields and sectors. In comparison, GD_Founder_2 brought expertise in business for the medical industry, and GD_Founder_1, as CTO, was the primary contact person for GD discussing relevant technical topics with previous experience in relevant research fields. GD_Founder_3 and GD_Founder_4, who bring equivalent experience to the firm, replaced the founding team. GD had her first touching point with entrepreneurship before working for GD_Company. She participated in a programming competition where she won. By winning the competition, she got a sponsorship to build her own company, which she tried to start. According to her, the later business failed because the sponsorship was insufficient, and the government refused to support her further, making her look out for international opportunities. She discovered an opportu- A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1651 nity for support in Germany, but at the same time, she got a job offer from GD_Company, which she ultimately took. Nevertheless, GD started her job with a high initial passion for entrepreneurship as “it was [her]main idea to found a startup.”. She reported that when asked during her job interview where she sees herself in 5 years, GD said she wanted to have her own business then. GD enjoyed working with the initial founders before they left the firm. From GD_Founder_1 and GD_Founder_2, she perceived a high level of effort. She had never seen them leaving the office before herself and perceived them to invest extra effort beyond what was immediately required. If there was a problem at work, “they had to solve it today.”. After the initial founders left the firm and the new managers took over, she perceived a decline in effort: “so the founder team, I would say they were more invested as the current ones.”. She described the initial founders, GD_Founder_1 and GD_Founder_2, as “the creative minds” who brought the ideas in and worked intensively to improve the product. However, after the change, she saw GD_Founder_3 and GD_Founder_4 “working the same as us - 40 hours” per week, not being committed to improving the product as they “don’t bring the ideas” and leaving the office regularly before herself. Additionally, she perceived low passion from the new supervisors. According to her, they focus on profitability, company benefit, and delivering a minimal valuable product. Instead, the initial founders were able to create and improve the product and cared more about the customers as they traveled more to customers in person to solve their problems. Perceiving different levels of effort and passion by the two different managing teams led to different effects on GD. Perceiving the effort of the initial founders increased her level of effort while they worked in “challenging” times and solved problems together. They enhanced her in gaining responsibility for more entrepreneurial tasks when she traveled to customers for specific tasks even though “normally, software developers do not travel.” Especially the effort they put into their product affected GD as she said, “[...]if your employers are more focused on entrepreneurship or they are spending more effort on the product that they have created, you see that, and you also get more motivation as well.”. This effect changed to the opposite after the new managers were in charge, and GD perceived little effort. Now, she is considering reducing her working hours from 40 to 35 and tracking her working time to avoid substantial overtime. She will not increase her effort if she does not benefit personally from it. Concurrently, her entrepreneurial passion decreased as she now feels “that I kind of lost that mindset as well. But with the founders, I was so much searching to do the stuff, and I was so really focused on the idea of having a business, but right now, I lost it. Not fully lost it, but it is definitely decreased. So, there is a huge effect.”. She also perceived this effect in her last job when she worked solely on solving daily problems and lost the drive to continue on entrepreneurial tasks. Narrowing down her effort solely on daily tasks was “kind of affecting” for her, “even though you don’t realize it.”. She feels the same as she had felt in her previous job: “Being a normal employee that’s just saving the day as I had in Turkey.” To explain this effect, she used a metaphor related to the contagion effect described in the theory section: “In Turkey, we say if you want to know the person you should ask the friends. You look at the friend to understand the other person. So, if you are working with a colleague who is entrepreneurship-focused, you will be mirroring yourself one day. As soon as you get closer, you communicate, you discuss, so you get some ideas from your friend. So, this is what I feel. So, if you have a friend who is up there, it pulls you up.” In addition, she said: “I mean even for the children. If you look at the children, they are the copy of their families. It is the same. You are so close to your family, so you become a copy of them. And the same with friends. You only become friends with people who are like you, or they will affect you in a way that you will look like them at some point. So same for colleagues as well. If they are so motivated and have nice ideas that will bring value to you. At some point, you will be like them. So, it is mirroring or pulling each other to the same level, like this.”. Overall, GD started her journey with a high initial entrepreneurial passion. While working with the initial founders of GD_Company, she perceived a high level of passion and effort, which increased her level of effort and passion. However, after the change in management, she perceived less passion and effort, which decreased her effort and entrepreneurial passion. 4.1.3. The case of RB RB is a 27-year-old serial entrepreneur who has founded two companies in the past five years. He studied Management & Computer Science in Germany after living in Turkey and Dubai in his teenage years. During a working student job for a cloud service provider for compliance and investor relations, he started his first company, an information platform for cryptocurrencies, with the help of his former CEO after discussing this opportunity with him. RB, therefore, became an intrapreneur. After running out of money during the covid pandemic, he left the firm. Then, he started a mental health company focusing on building a learning and communication platform for people with mental and psychological issues. He reduced to part-time work on this project as he realized that investors were unwilling to invest the money he wanted to launch the product successfully and make the firm grow. He then decided to gain experience in an established young venture to learn from others’ experiences. Since the beginning of 2022, he has worked for a construction-tech startup in northern Germany, which recently secured a Series B investment. The goal of RB_Company is to unite all participants in the construction sector and transform their collaboration through software and customer service. RB started as a venture developer, but he was recently promoted to the interim head of marketing, operating in close contact with the founders. The founding team consists of three people who are still at the company. Together, they bring in more than 25 years of professional experience A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641652 in different ventures and gained insights into working for other startups before becoming entrepreneurs. RB started his position at RB_Company with a high initial entrepreneurial passion as he previously founded two firms. He mentioned that he enjoys working in entrepreneurial environments because of the different impressions he gained during that time. Also, learning new things and being independent “triggered this passion” in the first place, and he believes this passion increases the longer he works in this environment. RB reported a mixed perception of effort. On the one hand, he recognized the high effort behind the venture by saying: “Even when I look at RB_Company now, for example, I notice how much hard work is behind it, even more than before.”, reporting that his founders are “24/7 available” and receiving messages after midnight. On the other hand, he emphasized that his founders try to maintain a balance for their mental health. About RB_Founder_1, he said he “[...]is super athletic and eats a super healthy diet, pays attention to his sleep, and is rather meticulous and disciplined about ensuring he gets enough balance. When asked whether he feels that his founder works too much or too little on his tasks, he answered, “well, that’s super different. Right now, I feel like he’s taking on a management task more than he’s taking on the task. So, he’s trying to create more pressure on the people, that it’s prioritized properly among them, instead of him doing the task himself.”. Compared to the other cases, RB perceived a neutral level of effort. Concerning the entrepreneurial passion he perceived, he was clearer in his statements as he described RB_Company as the founders’ “[...]baby for which they would do anything to make it work.”. Additionally, he recognizes in every meeting that they show how important the tasks are to them and how much of the “fire” they have. As he also reported feeling the passion spread by the founders, overall, RB perceived a high level of entrepreneurial passion. As RB founded two ventures before working for RB_Company, it was not surprising that he reported that he constantly works many hours and is willing to go the extra mile “whenever there is a chance to go the extra mile.” There was no evidence in the data that his level of effort changed during his time at RB_Company. Neither was it influenced by the perception of the founders’ efforts. Concerning the development of his entrepreneurial passion, he reported: “My passion has basically not changed. [...]I simply realized that it was more difficult than I thought. It’s more complex than I thought. There are so many problems that you have to manage at the same time.” Later during the interview, he once again mentioned that his passion for entrepreneurship stayed the same. To conclude, RB started his role at RB_Company with a high initial entrepreneurial passion. Although he perceived high entrepreneurial passion and neutral entrepreneurial effort, there is no notice in the data that his level of effort and passion changed while collaborating with the founding team closely. 4.1.4. The case of MS MS, 25 years old, is a software engineer who holds a master’s degree in computer science from a German university. Throughout his studies, he gained working experiences in different company sizes, from small to large corporations, from consulting to production. After graduating, he acted as a Co-Founder and CTO of a software startup in the video stream business for six months. He left the company after the lack of success and personal differences with the other founder. Then, he joined MS_Company, where he also worked during his studies as a working student and intern as a software engineer. There, he builds the foundation for the product together with the CTO. MS_Company is a software-as-a-service company that helps customers connect their systems and platforms. His responsibilities contain the technical onboarding of new customers, maintaining the infrastructure of the software, and working on the integrability of different systems. The founding team consists of three entrepreneurs. MS_Founder_2 and MS_Founder_3 met while working for a large consulting firm after graduating for a few years. MS_Founder_2 started another venture before starting MS_Company, which was acquired just before the new venture creation, and is, therefore, a serial entrepreneur. MS_Founder_1 completes the founding trio and acts as CTO and CPO, whom MS works close with due to his technical background. MS_Founder_1 is highly experienced, with more than 20 years in the industry, and had already former roles as CTO, CPO, and VP in other software firms. MS could imagine trying to found another startup one day. Because MS founded a startup before joining MS_Company, he can be considered highly passionate about entrepreneurship even before working for his current employer. He reported that he is highly passionate about inventing when talking about entrepreneurial passion. He enjoys creating new products, especially “[...]creating something that other people will use.”. According to him, his main drive for his professional career is the “creation of things.” He also explained that the startup environment would fit his interest in creating new things best. Hence, he joined MS_Company, where he feels to get exceptional support for his passion. MS perceives a high level of entrepreneurial effort and passion from his founders. While talking about MS_Founder_1, he mentioned that he could not remember a moment when MS_Founder_1 was not at work. MS perceives MS_Founder_1 to give “1000%” to his company. Besides, he perceives that the boundaries between his founder’s work life and private life become blurred since he perceives a high likelihood of getting responses to questions after 11 pm. When I asked MS about how passionate his founders are, he replied: “I think more is almost impossible. That would be my perception.”. While working for MS_Company, both the entrepreneurial passion and effort of MS increased. He described himself as a high performer who puts a lot of passion, time, and energy into his tasks. Also, he is sure that one day he will try the step again to start his own company. He also mentioned that his level of effort is higher than initially expected by his A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1653 supervisors, which they also communicated to him. Besides, he estimated that, on average, he works harder and with more effort than other people with similar tasks inside and outside his company. He reported that even in his private environment, people perceived that MS increased his level of effort, for example, when he refused to go out on a Friday evening and chose to work instead. While telling that story, MS revealed notions of contagion as he reported trying to think in the context of the venture and therefore adapted to think entrepreneurially. Furthermore, when asked about the effects of perceiving the behavior of his supervisors, he stated: “I would say rousing and motivating rather - to show that you can do it.”, which indicates a contagion effect. All in all, MS joined MS_Company with a high initial entrepreneurial passion. He perceived highly passionate entrepreneurs who work on their tasks with high effort. Working for his founders increased his level of effort and entrepreneurial passion. 4.1.5. The case of CH CH is a 28-year-old bachelor’s graduate in Management and Computer Science. He gained his first working experience in customer success for a startup called CH_Company, where he worked for one and a half years. He joined the firm during the phase where they secured their Series B round. CH_Company produces software for digital identity recognition and management. CH supported the aftersales process inside the customer success department. The founding team consisted of two co-founders. CH interacted most with CH_Founder_1 and had fewer touching points with CH_Founder_2. Both founders are highly experienced, with more than 40 years of combined working experience. They have already founded and exited a startup in the past successfully together. As a multi-serial entrepreneur founding several firms in their collaboration, CH_Founder_1 has more experience in the field of entrepreneurship, with more than five new ventures created. During his time at CH_Company, he experienced a change in the CEO role. CH_Founder_1 dropped out of the daily operative work and took the role of a chairman supervising the company’s business while CH_Founder_2 stayed. After his time at CH_Company, CH was selected for an entrepreneurship scholarship and founded a startup. With a young team of four people with different backgrounds, he tried to establish a digital education platform. His company created an MVP, secured investments, and hired multiple people for sales, marketing, and software development. After one and a half years, they quit this project due to a lack of perceived market acceptance by potential customers. Afterward, CH remained in the entrepreneurial ecosystem for finance solutions and joined a Southern European startup focusing on a platform for sustainable investing for a half-year project. Later and until today, CH started working for another startup in northern Germany with a product idea similar to the one he tried to create. Before joining CH_Company, CH did not consider becoming an entrepreneur one day. Even after he started his position there, “it was never within realistic reach to found a venture.” Despite some lectures at university, the topic of entrepreneurship never crossed his path. Therefore, CH started to explore the entrepreneurial world with a low initial passion for entrepreneurship. Considering CH’s perceptions of his founders’ effort and passion, CH reported different perceptions. On the one hand, he perceived his founders to be low-passionate and to put low effort into their tasks while working for CH_Company. For example, CH described that his founders felt attached to other projects during their time at CH_Company and that he assumes that they are people who always enjoy trying out new projects. Therefore, they did not express or show passion for their current venture but already looked at other projects. Concerning their effort, CH estimated their average working hours for the startup by “far below 40” hours a week because they “did many other things” in parallel. He observed CH_Founder_1 reduce his operative involvement step by step until he only held supervising tasks. He explained his understanding of his supervisors’ behavior as they had to split their attention to engage in other projects. On the other hand, he perceived them to be highly passionate about other projects outside CH_Company because they tend to initiate multiple projects in parallel. CH reported that his founders worked on building a platform for entrepreneurs and establishing a venture capitalist firm while they ran CH_Company. CH perceived his founders as “creative people who always want to let off steam in new projects.”. He was impressed by the entrepreneur’s high passion for founding which impacted him highly. Perceiving the behavior of his supervisors had a considerable effect on CH as he got inspired by them. CH participated in an entrepreneurship program which CH_Founder_1 did as well in the past, and started his venture afterward, which indicates an increase in entrepreneurial passion. Additionally, he reported that after his time at CH_Company, he developed a high passion for being creative, finding solutions, and creating things himself which are all types of entrepreneurial passion. It is mainly his passion for inventing that increased as he reported that “[...]creating something is something that I really enjoy because it’s kind of ‘your baby’ [laughing]. And be it somehow a product, a website, or anything else.” His effort level shows parallels to the behavior of his founders as he put “inconsistent” effort into his venture where “there were probably also weeks where [he]really worked full-time on it, and there were also weeks [...]where [he]worked very little and only a few hours on it.”. When I asked what had to be different so he would have spent more effort, he replied, “fewer distractions, fewer side projects. So, it’s just that I was doing quite a lot in parallel at the time.”. It resembles the perceived behavior of his supervisors. Concerning effort, he also mentioned that perceiving a high level of effort impressed him. However, it also made him feel intimidated, that he needs his work-life balance in working environments and that he is currently not ready to go the effort commitment needed to start another venture again. A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641654 Overall, CH started with a low initial passion for entrepreneurship. He perceived low effort and low passion from his founders while working for CH_Company, but simultaneously, he perceived high passion from them while they were working on other projects. Inspired by the founders, his entrepreneurial passion increased while his effort lowered. 4.1.6. The case of JK JK is a 25-year-old German business computer science graduate who worked for a startup called JK_Company that has been operating in the gastronomy sector for more than four years. He worked in distinct roles as a customer success manager and product manager for the company and was one of the first employees hired. He supported developing an app enabling customers to order food, pay, and collect points. The company had to shut down during the pandemic because most restaurants and cafes were not allowed to operate, resulting in a shortage of money. Consequently, JK left the firm. However, the company was acquired mid-2022 and now runs under new leadership. Since he was the first employee, he frequently communicated with the founding team. It consisted of three young and inexperienced students who met during an entrepreneurship program at their university. They barely gained working experience outside of internships and working student jobs. During the time of the company’s foundation, they had an overall full-time working experience of fewer than three years combined, mainly in consulting. All three came in with different academic backgrounds graduating in business, psychology, and computer science in their master’s programs. After his time at JK_Company, JK continued their idea with new developments in his startup. He developed an MVP of an app and hired some employees to grow the venture. Currently, he is looking for investors to expand the firm and gain market share. On social media, he describes himself as an open-minded person willing to go the extra mile. JK developed a high initial passion for entrepreneurship before joining JK_Company, as he was born and raised in a family of many entrepreneurs. His grandparents and some of his uncles and aunts had owned businesses and showed their passion for entrepreneurship. His family affected him, as he explained: “[...]I think that rubbed off relatively early on because I saw how freely they could move around, how much fun they had [...].”. Subsequently, he thought about owning a business himself one day, which he fulfilled later. While working for JK_Company, JK perceived high entrepreneurial effort and passion from his founders. He reported that they never worked less than 80 hours per week. He described their effort as the “prime example of going the extra mile within those years.”. He felt that his founders “only live for this project,” which led one to join a retreat because of burnout symptoms. JK highlighted the founders’ love for their product, as they might even be the people who used it most. He explained that passion was very influential during his time at JK_Company. Working for JK_Company increased JK’s level of effort. He said that “there were extremely many weeks where I didn’t get out of the office with less than 60-70 hours, and I really pushed things through on the weekends because I had the feeling that it was necessary.” and that “it has often gone beyond, very often gone beyond” a regular working framework. Additionally, he took on extra tasks and responsibilities to help the firm. For example, he independently invested additional effort in learning in-app design to support the founders in this task, as they could not hire someone for that. Also, his passion for entrepreneurship increased as he reported working with a high passion for JK_Company. He argues that one of the main reasons for his effort was his “passion for this topic.” He described that this passion emerged and grew with the increase of his involvement in entrepreneurial tasks. For example, he said, “Personally, I would say that this entrepreneurial passion has definitely increased due to the responsibility I got in the product area.”. While analyzing the interview with JK, it became clear that he was highly affected by his founders as he rooted his decision to start a venture in perceiving his founders. For example, he explained: “That is to say, this bridge, this connection, between what I had with the founders, what was now in retrospect, of course, very unfortunate that it did not work, but was crucial and determining for my decision to say I will now found a company myself.”, or “I think maybe the bottom line of why I personally made this decision to say I’m willing to do this myself was actually the - I would call it - the rise and fall of what the founders themselves have gone through.”. This effect goes in line with the mentioned contagion mechanisms. To summarize, JK started to work for JK_Company with high initial entrepreneurial passion and became acquainted with a founding team that he perceived to be highly passionate and high in effort. This perception increased his passion and effort, resulting in him becoming a startup founder. 4.1.7. The case of LL LL, a holder of a master’s degree in finance and management from a German university, is 25 years old and has always wanted to become an entrepreneur. He developed an entrepreneurial mindset early on during school as he started to buy different consumer goods on the internet and sold them to his former classmates, friends, and family. During his bachelor studies, he co-founded a management service for serviced apartment providers in a big German city, which operated for one year but closed due to a lack of demand and the focus on other projects. LL has gained experiences in several European firms, such as banks, consultancies, startups, and venture capitalists. He was also a member of an entrepreneurial network. After finishing the bachelor’s program, he got an offer to work for a big consultancy firm. However, he rejected it because it would not be relatable enough to entrepreneurship. Parallel to his master’s, he worked for a venture capitalist where he intensively collaborated with early-staged ventures in the entrepreneurial opportunity development processes. Then, after graduating, he tried to start a venture with two colleagues. Later, to establish a business plan and a business case and pitch their ideas to A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1655 several investors, they delayed the final commitment to start operating for several reasons. However, the main reason was that they wanted to become more experienced before taking the risk of creating a serious business themselves. LL finally signed as chief of staff for a construction-tech startup in northern Germany. It is the same company where RB works. RB referred LL for this study. They know each other from entrepreneurial networks. LL started half a year earlier than RB at this company. To stick to the naming convention and for simplicity reasons, I will refer to the firm as LL_Company, although it is the same as the RB_Company. In this role, he acts as the right hand of the founders and collaborates closely with all of them. Additionally, he acted as interim head of people for the company during the time of the interview. LL joined LL_Company with a high initial entrepreneurial passion. As already described, he started to gain interest in entrepreneurship when he was a child, gained several working experiences in the entrepreneurial environment, founded a venture himself, and pursued an entrepreneurial career. LL perceived low entrepreneurial effort from his founders compared to the other cases. He reported that “they’re already stepping on the gas. But I think at a healthy level and could still be a bit more.” when I asked about their level of effort. According to him, other entrepreneurs put more effort into their ventures. Additionally, he sometimes feels they want to delay specific tasks or decisions, although, in LL’s opinion, they could tackle them the same evening, implicating a lack of perceived effort. Suitably, LL described them as focused on “having a healthy lifestyle” when he talked about the perceived effort and that they suggested he should step down sometimes. Concerning their entrepreneurial passion, he perceived a low level of passion. He described that they do not express their passion “Jordan Belfort-like” because they are somewhat “restrained,” and overall, they “don’t show their passion that often to the outside.” As an example, he described their company meetings where the “speech from them, that doesn’t appeal to [him]so much. [They]could make it more emotional.”. While working for LL_Company, LL’s level of effort at the starting point was very high, but lately, he questioned his effort level and thought about decreasing hit. Usually, he works “clearly over 40 hours” a week, completes tasks on weekends, and has projects where he worked for multiple weeks “until the middle of the night.” He claimed that stepping on the gas even more, would not be possible. In situations where his founders express a low level of effort, he said, “yes, that annoys me extremely because I think I give 110% here, and I want to tear the thing down. [...]And then, of course, you question yourself in one situation or another. Is it worth it? Shouldn’t you also slow down a bit?” and “It just gets on your nerves, and you think that they’re not there today with the right attitude, and that drags you down. So, I would definitely agree that this influences my attitude.”. This led him to question his level of effort or, as he said: “I often ask myself the same question. Whether it would be right to make ‘piano,’ because they advise me with their experience and say go a little slower.”, resulting in actually decrease the effort due to a low perception of effort: “And when you realize, okay, the boss doesn’t have the drive or doesn’t have the energy, then you think, why should I put in the energy?”. When asked about the impact of this perception on his passion for entrepreneurship, his answers diverged. On the one hand, he told that “the fire still burns” and that he still wants to found himself again. On the other hand, he mentioned that “[...] there is the negative impact of ‘well, you see how it actually works in reality.” and that it is not that easy and “[...]glorified, as it is just always presented from the outside [...]”. Subsequently, he concluded about his development of passion: “So I’d have to say it reduced, but on a different basis, because now I have more experience and more knowledge and skills and so on.”. To summarize, LL started his job at LL_Company with a high entrepreneurial passion. He perceived his founders to invest a low level of effort with low passion, which resulted in him questioning his level of effort and reducing his passion for entrepreneurship. In the case of LL, the contagion mechanism became evident in the negative manner in which he described himself by saying: “But of course, if you just think, yes, the founder isn’t working too hard, and the company isn’t successful either, then that’s just frustrating. Then you think, what am I actually doing? If he’s not up for it, I’m not up for it either, and then maybe you don’t feel like founding a company anymore if you’ve had such a negative experience.”. That statement indicates that his level of effort and passion dropped. 4.1.8. The case of AW AW is 25 years old and works as a business development representative in the sales area for a startup in south Germany that develops a communication app for other businesses. She holds a degree in fashion management from a business school. AW has several experiences as a working student for industry and fashion firms in HR. However, she had no touching points with entrepreneurship prior to working for AW_Company in her current role. Neither did she ever want to become an entrepreneur herself. As a business development representative, she does not share collaborative tasks with the founding team. However, due to the venture’s early stage, she perceives her founders daily at work. The founding team consists of AW_Founder_1 and AW_Founder_2. AW_Founder_1 is a business management graduate who worked for four years as a project leader for a big German production firm before founding AW_Company. In parallel, he is a member of the advisory board of another venture. On his social media profiles, he claims he is very passionate about the firm and the product he creates. AW_Founder_2 is a serial entrepreneur who graduated in media management and enterprise communications. He worked for several firms for nearly four years before founding his first firm, a web design consultancy. Then, he came together with AW_Founder_1 to create AW_Company. AW described herself as someone who “honestly didn’t have such intensive thoughts” about entrepreneurship before A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641656 joining AW_Company, which actually “was a bit random.” She mentioned that passion for entrepreneurship was not her “main focus or main reason for taking the job.” Therefore, AW joined the startup with a low initial entrepreneurial passion. AW perceives her supervisors to work with much effort and passion. She described her founders as “crazy working” and that she “would assume that their life is our company. So, there is no separation either spatially or in terms of time. There is no separation between private life and AW_Company, so they live for it and are absorbed in it. It’s crazy how much they invest in it.”. Additionally, she perceives her founders to be “very passionate,” that “they live for it,” and that “they really put their heart and soul and their time into it.”. Perceiving her founders working with high effort on their tasks has neither changed AW’s effort nor her passion for entrepreneurship. She reported that she works less than other people in her firm, which she is happy about. Besides, she said about the effect of the perceived effort: “It doesn’t affect me so much that I now say I have to adapt there; I have to work just as much.”. She describes the workload related to founding a firm as a “deterrent” and concludes that a founder would “not have a private life anymore,” which would not suit her way of life. Although she was “within a very short time [...]inspired by the construct of a startup” and that she sees “how cool it can be to have your own startup because you can fulfill your dreams,” she does not feel the willingness to found a firm one day because of the high amount of effort needed. All in all, AW started her position at AW_Company with low entrepreneurial passion, which has not changed during her working period until today. AW perceived high effort and passion from her entrepreneurs. According to her, that perception had no noticeable impact on her passion and effort. Table 3shows a summary of the findings from the withincase analysis. It captures the initial passion, development of passion and effort, and perceived passion and effort for each case. As GD’s perceptions and own developments changed with the dropout of the original founding team, the results altered over time. I marked it in the table with an arrow meaning the first entry represents the state before the dropout, and the second entry represents the state after the dropout. In six out of eight cases, I assigned the same level of perceived effort and perceived passion. It supports the initial assumption of the combined contagion and self-regulation framework that employees concurrently perceive passion while perceiving effort and that these constructs are associated. Therefore, I propose the following: Proposition 1a: High perceived entrepreneurial effort increases the likelihood of perceiving high entrepreneurial passion. Proposition 1b: Low perceived entrepreneurial effort increases the likelihood of perceiving low entrepreneurial passion. 4.2. Case patterns and between-case analysis In the cases of MS, JK, and until the point when the founders left the company in the case of GD, all three cases showed positive synergies concerning entrepreneurial passion while perceiving high effort. The case of LL and the case of GD after the dropout of the founding team showed a negative effect on entrepreneurial passion while perceiving low effort. The mentioned cases align with what I expected as an outcome according to the combined theoretical framework on contagion and self-regulation that explains how perceived effort could affect the employees’ passion response. MS, JK, and GD, with her initial founders, reported that they perceived high effort by their supervisors. These perceptions, in turn, triggered an increase in their effort, which the mentioned contagion theory can explain. Then, explained by self-regulation theory, the higher level of effort positively impacted their passion for entrepreneurial tasks. Therefore, working for their corresponding firms made them more passionate about entrepreneurial tasks than they were prior to their employment. The opposite happened in the case of LL, and the case of GD after the new CEOs took over. Both perceived their corresponding supervisors to work on their tasks with little effort. This perception led GD to decrease her effort and LL to develop a tendency to reduce his effort. In turn, their entrepreneurial passion declined as both wanted to become entrepreneurs before their employment, and now they are questioning that plan. In addition, the high-effort cases also showed that the participants perceived high passion from the entrepreneurs, and the low-effort cases showed a low passion perception by the employees. Therefore, perceiving effort might covariate with perceiving passion, with both going in the same direction. In the cases of RB and AW, the data revealed that the perception of effort did not influence their entrepreneurial passion. The data in the cases of JG and CH showed counterintuitive results according to the temporal theoretical framework. JG perceived high effort, which increased his level of effort but instead of his entrepreneurial passion increasing, it declined. CH perceived a low level of effort by his supervisor that lowered his level of effort, which impacted him even after leaving the firm. Instead of his passion for entrepreneurial tasks declining, his passion increased as he later founded a firm, where, according to him, he failed to succeed due to his low level of effort. 4.2.1. Proximity to the founders, entrepreneurial-relatedness of the tasks, and initial entrepreneurial passion All cases that went along the expected outcome, speaking of MS, JK, and GD for observing high effort, which increased their entrepreneurial passion, and speaking of LL and GD for observing low effort, which decreased their passion followed a pattern. All these employees have high proximity to their founders, their tasks are highly entrepreneurial-related, and they had high initial entrepreneurial passion before starting the role in their corresponding startup. This finding indicates that a particular involvement of these three factors is a possible requirement for the initiation of the proposed effects of A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-1664 1657 Table 3: Summary of within-case analysis Case Initial Passion Perceived Effort Perceived Passion Effort development Passion development JG Low High High Lower Lower GD High High →Low High →Low Higher →Lower Higher →Lower RB High Neutral High Neutral Neutral MS High High High Higher Higher CH Low Low High Lower Higher JK High High High Higher Higher LL High Low Low Lower Lower AW Low High High Neutral Neutral the combined mechanism. In the cases where the mechanism worked as expected, these three factors were above a specific boundary compared to the other cases where the observation did not follow the expected way. Proximity can be understood broadly in the employeeentrepreneur relationship. It can include the employee’s feeling of a close connection to the supervisors, frequent communication, spatial proximity with sitting next to each other in the same office, and a role-based close collaboration as being the head of a particular department, for example. Having high proximity between the entrepreneur and the employee increases the frequency and intensity of the contagion effect as both subjects have more and deeper points of interaction which facilitates the effect’s occurrence. It aligns with other scholars’ assumptions that employees feel being in the same boat as their founders (Breugst et al., 2012). Higher proximity to the founder at work helps to get richer perceptions of the entrepreneurial effort. It is because the employee perceives the entrepreneur more often, evaluates his level of effort more reliably and draws more accurate inferences about how effort leads to progress for the venture, which is necessary for effort contagion to occur. Table 4shows examples of statements about proximity to the founders from the interview participants. Having tasks that are rich in entrepreneurial content is also essential for observing the expected effects. These tasks can typically include acts of inventing or developing the firm. Usually, these tasks have a high degree of decisional freedom, high creativity, deep product involvement, high hierarchy levels, or high responsibility. Working on these types of tasks with the entrepreneur facilitates the contagion effect as these tasks are more similar to the actual tasks of the entrepreneur and, therefore, closer related to entrepreneurial passion. It increases the likelihood for the employee to perceive a goal that is more accessible and eases goal contagion. Putting effort into entrepreneurial-related tasks helps the self-regulation mechanism affect the passion for entrepreneurial tasks. Table 5displays the comments of the interviewed employees on their tasks. The found patterns in effort perception lead to the development of these propositions: Proposition 2a: A high proximity to the founders increases the likelihood that perceived effort triggers the combined contagion and self-regulation mechanism, where high perceived effort increases entrepreneurial passion and low perceived effort decreases entrepreneurial passion. Proposition 2b: A high entrepreneurial-relatedness of the employee’s task increases the likelihood that perceived effort triggers the combined contagion and self-regulation mechanism, where high perceived effort increases entrepreneurial passion and low perceived effort decreases entrepreneurial passion. Proposition 2c: A high initial entrepreneurial passion increases the likelihood that perceived effort triggers the combined contagion and selfregulation mechanism, where high perceived effort increases entrepreneurial passion and low perceived effort decreases entrepreneurial passion. 4.2.2. Effort-Passion discrepancy and the perceived effortpassion antagonism Suppose proximity to the founders, entrepreneurialrelatedness of the employee’s tasks, or initial entrepreneurial passion are low. In that case, this might change the expected effect of perceived effort on the employee’s passion response, as in the cases of JG and CH. As shown in the case of JG, he had high proximity to his founders, but his tasks were low in entrepreneurial-relatedness, and he had low initial passion. Concurrently, the temporal model did not deliver the expected outcome. He reported perceiving high entrepreneurial effort by his supervisors, which triggered his effort and increased it. Instead of his entrepreneurial passion increasing like in the other cases, it declined as he did not enjoy the effort, which distanced him from an entrepreneurial career, as he explained. Although the supervisor’s effort successfully transferred from JG_Founder_1 to JG, the selfregulation mechanism did not occur. The turning point in his case might be his initial entrepreneurial passion which was relatively low compared to other cases. JG had no touching point with entrepreneurship prior to his role at JG_Company. A. K. Kallinikidis /Junior Management Science 9(3) (2024) 1634-16641664 Podsakoff, P. M., & Organ, D. W. (1986). Self-reports in organizational research: Problems and prospects. Journal of Management,12(4), 531–544. Pratt, M. G. (2009). From the Editors: For the Lack of a Boilerplate: Tips on Writing Up (and Reviewing) Qualitative Research. Academy of Management Journal,52(5), 856–862. https://doi.org/10.5465/ amj.2009.44632557 Russell, J. A. (2003). Core affect and the psychological construction of emotion. Psychological Review,110(1), 145–172. https://doi.org/10. 1037/0033-295x.110.1.145 Schoenewolf, G. (1990). Emotional contagion: Behavioral induction in individuals and groups. Modern Psychoanalysis,15(1), 49–61. Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research techniques. Sage Publications Thousand Oaks, CA. Suddaby, R. (2006). From the Editors: What Grounded Theory is Not. Academy of Management Journal,49(4), 633–642. https://doi. org/10.5465/amj.2006.22083020 Sullins, E. S. (1991). Emotional Contagion Revisited: Effects of Social Comparison and Expressive Style on Mood Convergence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,17(2), 166–174. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/014616729101700208 Vallerand, R. J., Blanchard, C., Mageau, G. A., Koestner, R., Ratelle, C., Leonard, M., & Marsolais, J. (2003). Les passions de l’ame: On obsessive and harmonious passion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,85(4), 756–767. https://doi.org/10.1037/00223514.85.4.756 Visser, V. A., van Knippenberg, D., van Kleef, G. A., & Wisse, B. (2013). How leader displays of happiness and sadness influence follower performance: Emotional contagion and creative versus analytical performance. The Leadership Quarterly,24(1), 172–188. https: //doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.09.003 Weick, K. E. (1984). Small wins: Redefining the scale of social problems. American Psychologist,39(1), 40–49. https://doi.org/10.1037/ 0003-066x.39.1.40